A contrastive study of linguistic features of newspaper headlines about covid-19 in English and Vietnamese

Abstract

Newspaper as a type of media text are considered as a credible and authoritative source of local, national and international information that have immediate concerns for every reader. To draw the reader’ attention to their papers and topics, the journalists rely very heavily on the headlines which are in themselves a distinct type of text. It can be said that understanding the headlines of the news is a gateway to understand the whole news, so news headlines is an area worthwhile for us to go deep into. The purpose of the study is to investigate and analyze linguistic features used in both English and Vietnamese newspaper headlines about Covid-19. Besides, a comparison between English and Vietnamese newspaper headlines is presented. After the description and comparison, qualitative and quantitative methods are used to present the similarities and differences between Vietnamese newspaper headlines about Covid-19 and English ones. The corpus of the study consists of 100 English newspaper headlines collected in www.bbc.com, www.theguardian.com, www.reuters.com, www.cnn.com, www.nytimes.com and 100 Vietnamese newspaper headlines of news collected from famous online newspapers on worldwide webs such as www.vietnamnet.vn, www.vietbao.vn, www.vneconomy.com and tuoitre.vn. The result of this paper will provide readers with useful knowledge in terms of linguistic features, which can help language learners apply and translate newspaper headlines more effectively.